Senescence, the Last Half of Life

by G. Stanley Hall

If and so far as it is true that a woman is as old as she looks and a man as he feels, all this processional, especially its early stages, is, on the whole, probably much harder for her than for him. She feels not only that “the coming of the crow’s foot means the going of the beau’s foot,” but the first wrinkles about the mouth, eyes, or under the chin; the loss of fullness about the neck, to which folklore attributes such significance; the first sagging of the cheeks or the bust; the first signs of fading complexion; or the first gray hair, give her bitter food for thought. Her cult of the mirror, that man progressively eschews, increases. But woman commands far more resources against all such heralds of decay than man and gives vastly more time to compensating for them. Youth is her glory and she has more comeliness to lose than man, who can, however, never quite rival the hag in ugliness. She has also great powers of compensation by affecting girlish ways and has a stronger hold on her youth than man and old women do not feel as old as old men do. Throughout married life, if she is well, woman usually assumes the rôle of the younger mate, even though she be not so in years. Though sexual involution comes to her earlier she remains in far more sympathetic touch with the young than her husband, so that there is a half truth and not mere gallantry in the saying that a woman never grows old.

The woman just beginning to feel passé has a psychology all her own of which even the devotees of that science know little and she herself yet less, but of which Michäelis in “The Dangerous Age” has given us a few glimpses. Love, wifehood, and motherhood, as the world knows, constitute the very heart of woman’s life and as the chance of these supreme felicities begins to fade, something, which it is no extravagance to call desperation, begins to supervene. Its processes may and often do deploy so deep in the subconscious regions of the soul that even she is but little aware of the transformations that are taking place there. These she quite commonly ignores, camouflages, or honestly and resentfully denies. The psychopathologist sees most clearly the tragedies of aborted Eros as they are writ large in morbid symptoms. But with the same causes and conditions, the same processes are always more or less active, however repressed, and the unmated woman before the close of the third decennium has generally come to some terms with the death of the phyletic instinct within her, which is the core and mainspring of her life, and has dimly anticipated all the significance of old age.

Happily for her dawning senescence, it is one of the great achievements of our age that she has found a splendid vicarious function in culture and new social, vocational, professional, and political services, so that she can now give to mankind much that is best in her that was once confined to the narrower sphere of domestic life, and be little or none the worse but perhaps the better for it. This great emancipation is building a new and higher story to her life, so that as the amative, heyday charm of her youth begins to abate she need no longer despair. All her earlier occupational training that fits her for self-support, complete or even partial, is, thus, anticipatory of this third new stage of life that the senium now begins to reveal to her. This gives her now a certain advantage over man. Thus she has found a new call that means not only more safety but priceless service, to which all her superfluous energies can be devoted, and the world now waits with an eagerness that is almost suspense to see whether she will have the courage to grapple with the most vital problems that confront her sex and find the wisdom to solve them or, neglecting these, be content with the effort to do man’s work in man’s ways.

Thus, woman is older than man in the same sense that the child is older than the adult, because her qualities are more generic and she is nearer to and a better representative of the race than he and also in that she sublimates sex earlier and more completely, entering the outer shadows of senectitude in the thirties. But she is also, at the same time, younger than he in that she is less differentiated in tissues or traits, less specialized and in her early decades must learn better than he to conserve so much that is best in the physique and esprit of her youth. If her physiological change, when it comes, is more marked, abrupt, and datable, the psychic changes she undergoes are far more gradual and imperceptible, while her sympathy with youth and even childhood, and in general not only her moral but all her normal instincts, which are the best gift the adolescent stage of life has to offer, are keener and surer.

This critical age has its own peculiar temptations to which woman entering middle life sometimes succumbs. She, like man, is prone to ask of the future whether it is all to be like the present or past and, if so, what is to become of the unfulfilled dreams of youth. The Prince Charming never came; or perhaps her ideal has proven only a clay image; or her affection, or his, may have found another focus that seems worthier. Hence it is in no wise strange that some women, hitherto good by the old standards, now make a break with their past, impelled to do so by an augmented desire to taste all the joys of life before it is forever too late. Not only does it seem intolerable to go on to the end as they are but there is perhaps some tempter who detects and waters these seeds of discontent and helps the middle-aged woman on to feel that she has been a coward to life. Beaudelaire, who certainly thought he understood French women, said that for most of them at thirty-five who are married and perhaps for even more who are unwed, anything was possible. Even curiosity is a spur to adventure and fancy, if not conduct, may prompt to cast off all restraints. “Why not?” is a question that incessantly arises and every answer seems unsatisfactory. And how many of us can qualify, by being without sin, to cast the first stone at those who fall here. Such women are too old to enter upon a life of vice but often form secret and occasionally very happy alliances with, usually, older men, which may last for years without involving any abandonment of their stated occupation or leaving the ranks of respectability and with now, unquestionably, a growing disposition on the part of society to condone, even though it may suspect or even know.

Again, as we men grow old, we recognize that we have lost something of whatever attraction we have had for the other sex generally and often come to regard most of its members as somewhat trivial and to prefer the society of other men. Even the love of husbands and wives happily married takes on a different character; and they are fortunate, indeed, if the losses are balanced or compensated for by the gains, as they should ideally be, or if friendship waxes as erotism wanes. The old beau who devotes attention without intention to younger women can, at best, only amuse and rarely interest them, although they may feel subtly flattered. Sometimes they find delectation in cajoling him and playing upon his weaknesses and they may also come to indulge in a freedom of speech and manner with him that they would never permit themselves with men of their own age; while, conversely, friendships between older women and younger men are always more sincere. The case of the doddering dotard with the flapper is rare, save in the literature of senile psychopathology and medical jurisprudence, where it is by no means uncommon. But this we shall not here discuss.

Senescent men are also too prone to attribute the other manifestations of their own abatement of philoprogenitive energy to the lessened ardor of their wives and perhaps to invoke the abnormal stimulus of some wild love to sustain, or at least to test, their vigor, not realizing that such a course accelerates rather than retards the involution that comes with age. The jealousy felt towards young, ardent wives by their older husbands lest they be made cuckold constitutes probably a far less frequent triangle and involves, on the whole, less suffering than that experienced by wives who are growing frigid with years toward their still lusty spouses. The age disparity of the climacteric may open a door for suspicions, however groundless, which may secretly sap the foundations of conjugal harmony. In this connection one must always take account of the fact that there is not seldom in man an Indian summer, of months or occasionally years, of enhanced inclination toward sex before its final extinction, as returns elsewhere reported show. From personal confessions and medical literature, studies made in old men’s homes, and sporadic evidence from other sources, I am convinced that for a very large proportion of old men the progressive loss of potence, with all the complex phenomena attending it, is one of the chief, and in many cases the very most psychalgic, experience of all the changes involved in growing old. There is a very pregnant sense in which a man is as old as the glands that dominate this phase of life. Laymen, including most physicians, know very little of and find it hard to credit the devices that may be resorted to to retard this atrophy or often to conserve and even enhance the vestiges of this function, the excessive activity of which is the surest preventative of a happy old age. While there are those who late in life resort to vicious and even pathological modes of gratification, those who became debauchees in youth or middle life very rarely even attain old age and all should heed the motto to “beware the Indian summer of eroticism.” Who has not observed among his personal acquaintances, to say nothing of men conspicuous in public life, the tragic consequences to health, occupation, and even life, that follow when December weds May; and what shall we say, even from the eugenic standpoint, of women who prefer to be an old man’s darling to a young man’s slave. We know, too, that children born of postmature parents are liable, if they mature at all, to do so precociously and to show early signs of senility, just as children born of those of premature age often fail to reach full maturity. If contraceptive methods are ever justifiable, it is to prevent offspring of both but perhaps especially the former kind.

On the other hand, we have many clinical cases in which after years of impotence from psychic causes the removal of these latter not only restored the procreative function but relieved the patient of often grave symptoms and brought marked mental rejuvenation. This has been often recorded, especially for men. In some instances, apparently, children have been born after such a period of dormancy or latency that has lasted for years. Not only is the downward slope of this curve far more gradual than its pubertal rise and, as we have seen, attended by more oscillations but there is far more individual variation in the age at which decline begins and ends, so that one man’s norm would be another man’s disaster and perhaps doom.

The old should be able to think most dispassionately upon such themes and should feel it incumbent upon them to transmit the wisdom born of their own experience and observation to the younger generation. In certain primitive races and modern societies and communities the old, usually of the same but sometimes even of the opposite sex are expected to initiate the members of the rising generation in the mysteries of sex. We now know the dangers and sometimes even incestuous tendencies with which such a course is sure to be beset; and if parents attempt to discharge this function for their children, or wherever it is done personally, there are perils. Indeed, none of the methods of sex education, of which so many have lately been proposed, have been entirely satisfactory. Perhaps this kind of training really ought to be one of the special functions of grandparents and they should prepare themselves for it. At any rate, while we have learned much in recent years of sex psychology, pedagogy, and hygiene for the young, we have almost no literature, and indeed know almost nothing of it for the old; and this despite the fact that they are in the greatest need of it and have practically no help in the solution of the novel and intricate problems they must now face, as best they can, alone.

One reason why treatises on the climacteric are so few and so inadequate is that the importance of the subject has only lately been recognized even by psychiatrists, gynecologists, or gerontologists; while another and more important reason is found in the extreme reluctance of the old to tell. Psychoanalysis is impossible unless it can overcome resistance, which it is often put to its wit’s ends to do. Modesty and perhaps prudery have veiled the physiological and, far more, the psychological aspect of this function. This instinct of concealment is no less, and probably far greater, in the old. They balk, evade, and deceive the investigator at every step. Psychoanalysts have strangely neglected this theme and generally even refuse to take patients of over forty or fifty years of age. What can be learned in homes for old men is usually by observation, from attendants and from inmates’ talk of each other, and those who answer questionnaires almost always fail to note facts even remotely related to this theme. Still, in this terra incognita we occasionally come upon the naked truth, only to realize that the retreat of Amor is the counterpart of its advent, as autumn is of springtide. What nature gives so prodigally in pubescent and adolescent years she garners with no less circumstance and no less attention to details, so that we are left, in the end, with no less tendencies to “polymorphic perversity” than before these were constellated into the normal sex life of maturity. Even some of the proclivities to auto-erotism and homosexuality may arise. Amatory reveries may increase as dreams of this character decrease and there are often flashing recrudescences of desire.